{ "archive_path": "archive/1788357615.680925", "base_url": "www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447", "basename": "", "bookmarked_date": "2026-09-02 14:00", "canonical": { "archive_org_path": "https://web.archive.org/web/www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447", "dom_path": "output.html", "favicon_path": "favicon.ico", "git_path": "git/", "google_favicon_path": "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.theatlantic.com", "headers_path": "headers.json", "htmltotext_path": "htmltotext.txt", "index_path": "index.html", "media_path": "media/", "mercury_path": "mercury/content.html", "pdf_path": "output.pdf", "readability_path": "readability/content.html", "screenshot_path": "screenshot.png", "singlefile_path": "singlefile.html", "warc_path": "warc/", "wget_path": "www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447/index.html" }, "domain": "www.theatlantic.com", "extension": "", "hash": "18EDK4H6NSKKAJ29H48E", "history": { "archive_org": [], "dom": [], "favicon": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--output", "favicon.ico", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.theatlantic.com" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:06.551166+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "favicon.ico", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788357615.680925", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:06.112155+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "git": [], "headers": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--head", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447/" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:06.745024+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788357615.680925", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:06.558316+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [], "media": [], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/@postlight/parser/cli.js", "https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447/" ], "cmd_version": "1.0.0", "end_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:25.329485+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788357615.680925", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:21.991515+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmpfh2cb9jc", "https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447/" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:21.977834+00:00", "index_texts": [ "If you\u2019re short on cash, there is someone in Riga, Latvia, who can help. \u201cYou can literally make 100k a month with this campaign,\u201d a young man with blond curls and a thick accent says into a camera. All you have to do is post on social media video clips of \u201canything that supports Republican.\u201d Unfamiliar with U.S. politics? No problem: \u201cIf you\u2019re not from the USA, like, What the fuck is even Republicans? like me,\u201d then simply go to Gemini or ChatGPT, he suggests, \u201cand be like \u2018Yo, Gemini, I want some videos promoting Republican values. Give me ideas.\u2019 Go to Gemini. Get ideas. Boom.\u201dThe man, who goes by Serviuos, is promoting a campaign called Elephant Clipping, run by his company, ClipIt. The company pays subcontractors, many from poorer countries in Eastern Europe and the global South, to chop up videos the company provides into bite-size pieces in the hope that the clips will go viral online.Such \u201cclipping\u201d operations have become a popular means of manipulating people\u2019s attention. Brands, influencers, musical artists, and others spend six-figure sums on such promotional campaigns. Perhaps inevitably, the practice is now moving into politics, often without the transparency required to know exactly what is being served up and by whom. Five months before the midterms, though, Serviuos is up-front about the goal of the Elephant Clipping campaign: \u201cSo that republican win in USA,\u201d he writes in one message. I sent Serviuos a list of questions about his work in American right-wing politics. He wrote back, \u201cSeems very out of context,\u201d but didn\u2019t comment further.Many video-clipping services operate in relative secrecy so that the public isn\u2019t aware of the manipulation of their social-media feeds. But the services also need to attract potential clippers. They typically rely on chat servers on Discord\u2014an internet messaging app that was initially developed for gamers.After an anonymous tipster flagged Elephant Clipping to me, I was able to access its Discord server and other related political-clipping campaign chats just by clicking \u201cJoin,\u201d noting on a form that I was based in the United States, and answering some questions about my availability and desire to clip. Once I was in, I could see the mechanics of the campaign, which pays huge sums of money to people\u2014many of whom appeared to be outside the U.S.\u2014to push video clips from accounts designed to look like those of ordinary Americans spontaneously touting reasons to favor the GOP.In one channel on the server, users can submit pro-Republican videos that they\u2019ve already posted on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts to be reviewed for payment. A separate Google Drive contains suggested videos for clippers to use, but \u201cyou can clip anything as long as it is positively framed conservative pro-Republican content,\u201d Serviuos explains to participants. He provides some examples: a video of \u201cTop 5 Joe Rogan moments,\u201d a video of a conservative YouTuber confronting liberals with the suggested caption \u201cSee how Nick Shirley handles being told to \u2018get the f* out\u2019 of a public property.\u201d Clippers are paid a proportionate share of the campaign\u2019s monthly budget of $300,000. Every 1 million views yields a $300 payout.Read: An unsettling glimpse into the GOP\u2019s futureThe videos that result are not publicly visible in the Discord. Some clipper accounts on social media, however, inadvertently revealed their participation in the campaign by repeating the 258-word \u201cGoal of the Campaign\u201d instructions in the captions of some of their short videos. The Instagram account @_politicalhub, for example, posted the caption alongside a video of Charlie Kirk calling Palestine a \u201cnonexistent place.\u201d Another account called @frontrawpolitics posted the instructional text in the caption of a video of a conservative influencer saying that she would never marry a liberal, \u201cbecause he\u2019s going to raise my son to be a faggot.\u201d Each video had only a single like, but both accounts had posted other videos, without the instructional caption, that collectively accrued tens of thousands of views.Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: servtheclipper / YouTube.The instructions contain no directive to add a disclosure that the video may result in the poster being paid or that it is part of an organized campaign. Clippers are instructed to use\u00a0U.S.-based proxy servers and to hide their location on social media to obfuscate that they\u2019re working from outside the United States. The server also doesn\u2019t disclose who\u2019s funding any of this. But it does leave some clues that lead to a relative of a Republican mega-donor.Elephant Clipping\u2019s operation is the newest version of \u201castroturfing\u201d\u2014orchestrated messaging designed to look like genuine expressions of grassroots support. In the 2016 election cycle, the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll farm outside St. Petersburg, tried to influence the U.S. presidential election with fake social-media posts, bot farms, and protests organized through Facebook. Teens in Macedonia also posted incendiary disinformation about U.S. politics in a bid to generate advertising revenue from the number of clicks they generated on Google and other platforms. Serviuos\u2019s clipping operations\u2014Elephant Clipping is just one of them\u2014are driving views to the cause they are being paid to promote.Isabel Linzer, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C.\u2013based think tank, told me that the existence of political clip farms operating at scale, such as Elephant Clipping, had been suspected but hadn\u2019t previously been confirmed. Earlier reports revealed more targeted operations. MS NOW, for instance, recently reported on a campaign in which influencers were paid to post videos supportive of the Democratic Senate candidate Haley Stevens. (She lost her primary race in Michigan last month anyway.) Linzer noted that Elephant Clipping stands out for the apparent scale of the investment and for its attempt to create faux grassroots support.In the Discord server I accessed, one of Serviuos\u2019s associates touts the campaign as \u201ca once in a lifetime opportunity\u201d to be a part of what \u201ccould be the biggest clipping campaign in the entire industry.\u201d Hyperbole, perhaps. And comparisons are hard to come by, because many of these campaigns involve private chat rooms. But the numbers that Elephant Clipping claims are very large. The operation aims to hit 1 billion views a month on videos its clippers post. It often falls short of that goal, but the campaign still regularly accrues hundreds of millions of views a week, according to automated campaign updates, which could not be independently verified. Serviuos seems to have been running the campaign for some time: Discord records for Elephant Clipping\u2019s budget go back only to April, but the campaign has been going on for \u201cabout a year now,\u201d Serviuos said in a video posted that month.Read: \u2018We need to do McCarthyism to the tenth power\u2019My examination of Elephant Clipping led me to several other, similar clipping campaigns that appeared linked to Serviuos and that all appeared to be pushing conservative content. Another site visible on the server, Monster Lab, displays large clipping-campaign budgets that have now ended. One \u201cpolitical clipping\u201d campaign that ran in February displays a $900,000 budget. Two other campaigns that ran in March and April, which involved making clips of a famous \u201cU.S. political commentator,\u201d also each listed a $900,000 monthly budget. Yet another campaign that ran last month had a $120,000 budget and instructed clippers to post videos edited from the YouTube channel of Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit organization co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk. It also links to a Google Drive folder with videos, mostly of his wife, Erika Kirk, that were uploaded on September 15, 2025, five days after Kirk\u2019s assassination. (Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point spokesperson, told me that \u201cI can pretty much guarantee we aren\u2019t working with a Latvian company\u201d and that none of the contractors the nonprofit works with are familiar with the clipping campaign.)A separate Discord server, called US Politics Clipping, is run by a young Norwegian named Anders Wed\u00f8e, who runs ClipSon, a Norwegian clipping company. US Politics Clipping links to the same Google Drive as Elephant Clipping. The folder includes videos of figures including Shirley, President Trump, and Vice President Vance, as well as the ESPN sports commentator Stephen A. Smith. US Politics Clipping displays a monthly budget of $125,000, and its users are restricted to posting only clips edited from the videos provided in the Google Drive. Wed\u00f8e declined to speak about his business\u2019s involvement in politics.Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: servtheclipper / YouTube; Getty.When I described Elephant Clipping to Whitney Phillips, a professor at the University of Oregon\u2019s School of Journalism and Communication, she told me, \u201cThat\u2019s just social media now.\u201d Phillips was only half-joking. Short-form video clips have become ubiquitous. \u201cThis moment is so disorienting. When you\u2019re looking right at something, you don\u2019t have enough information to describe what you\u2019re seeing,\u201d Phillips said. In prior technological cycles, many ads, such as television commercials, were obvious. On social media, many are unlabeled, especially those in the form of short videos, and they sometimes aim to convey the impression of a groundswell that doesn\u2019t exist.The Discord server doesn\u2019t specify who is paying Elephant Clipping or the other right-leaning political-clipping operations, but Google Drive folders in each of the Serviuos and Wed\u00f8e-run campaigns are filled with files uploaded by what appear to be three employees of Enclave & Key, a Las Vegas\u2013based marketing company: Jules Katz, the chief of staff; Benjamin Goodman, a vice president of operations; and Jack O\u2019Hara, the head of media production at an Enclave & Key subsidiary. O\u2019Hara and Katz seem to have uploaded videos to the Google Drive with their company email address. In at least one instance, O\u2019Hara also used what appears to be his personal email address. It\u2019s not specified what role, if any, Enclave & Key plays in the campaigns.Enclave & Key\u2019s CEO and founder is Blake Wynn, the 26-year-old nephew of the billionaire and conservative mega-donor Steve Wynn. (ClipSon runs a clipping campaign for Steve Wynn with a $10,000 monthly budget, which directs participants to a Google Drive of videos seemingly uploaded by Goodman.) Enclave & Key\u2019s services include connecting influencers to brands, organizing branding events, and other types of marketing, according to the company website.When I reached out to Blake Wynn with a list of questions, he responded that \u201cthere are a number of inaccuracies\u201d but declined to offer further clarification and didn\u2019t follow through on an invitation to talk. Enclave & Key told me in an emailed statement that \u201cnews has been clipped and shared for generations\u201d and described itself as an \u201cAmerican company engaged in a routine, longstanding and lawful practice, despite attempts to sensationalize it by invoking high-profile conservative names and portray it as something nefarious.\u201d\u00a0 Steve Wynn didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. Shortly after I first reached out to both Wynns, Enclave & Key, and others involved in the campaigns, the deletions started.By Thursday afternoon, video folders for clippers that had been uploaded to a Google Drive by Katz and O\u2019Hara had disappeared, though the same files were then posted by Goodman, who used an email address not linked to Enclave & Key. The Discord channels for US Politics Clipping and Elephant Clipping were also delisted from the publicly visible campaigns in the ClipSon and ClipIt Discords. The campaigns were still visible on Monster Lab, but descriptions explaining the purpose of each campaign were gone. On Friday morning, Enclave & Key Google Drives for the campaigns were taken down as well.Blake Wynn has connections beyond his uncle in the conservative mediasphere. During a November 2025 interview on the sports-focused podcast Bring the Juice, he said that he and Enclave & Key \u201cdo a lot of work in politics.\u201d Wynn also said that he regularly speaks with FBI Director Kash Patel, and that he was good friends with Kirk. In the same podcast, Wynn recounted sitting next to Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Election Night in 2024, alongside Elon Musk, UFC CEO Dana White, and Steve Witkoff, Trump\u2019s friend and special envoy. In the past several years, he\u2019s posted pictures of himself on Instagram at small gatherings at the White House and at Mar-a-Lago, alongside the Kirks and Tulsi Gabbard, the former director of national intelligence.Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Bryan Steffy / Getty.Clipping campaigns may lack transparency, but they likely are legal. \u201cThere\u2019s no clear-cut disclosure rules for these types of campaigns,\u201d Saurav Ghosh, a campaign-finance expert at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy nonprofit, told me. \u201cThis seems like a clear case of why we need more transparency rules for digital content so badly.\u201dElephant Clipping has some areas that are out of bounds, for reasons that aren\u2019t made clear. Clippers are instructed not to post videos of the journalist Megyn Kelly, the commentators Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or the anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, among others. Banned subjects include the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the cryptocurrencies that members of the Trump family have promoted. In the Turning Point USA campaign, clippers are barred from posting videos of Candace Owens, who has become an Erika Kirk antagonist.Clippers are also prohibited from telling people to \u201cvote for\u201d or \u201cvote against\u201d individual candidates or causes and cannot suggest that viewers \u201cdonate\u201d specific causes. It\u2019s possible, experts told me, that these limits are intended to avoid triggering campaign-finance regulations that would require the funder behind the campaign to be identified or to avoid content-moderation rules on social-media platforms. Two sub-campaigns in the Discord offer extra money for clippers to post favorable videos about Vivek Ramaswamy\u2014a GOP candidate for Ohio governor\u2014and Gabbard. Serviuos also manages clipping campaigns for the conservative influencers Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder. Both campaigns are listed on Monster Lab with $30,000 budgets for last month, and Crowder\u2019s campaign also links to an Enclave & Key\u2013connected Google Drive. (Neither Shapiro nor Crowder responded to requests for comment.)Read: The intellectual right is mad at the mess it\u2019s madeBlake Wynn claims to have met with both Ramaswamy and Gabbard. He said during his interview on Bring the Juice that he\u2019d shared a car with Ramaswamy as a part of Trump\u2019s 2024 Election Night victory motorcade. Last year, when Gabbard became director of national intelligence, Wynn posted pictures of himself with her at the swearing-in ceremony, along with a caption that read in part: \u201cI don\u2019t think this will be my last time in the Oval Office with YOU!\u201d Gabbard resigned in June. (Ramaswamy and Gabbard didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.)A decade after political interference on social media involving overseas actors first became a major issue, the pattern is repeating as the midterms approach. In 2018, Philip Howard, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, called attempts to influence elections via social media \u201cthe new normal.\u201d Elephant Clipping and its related campaigns show just how prescient he was." ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788357615.680925", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:20.306687+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447/" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:20.298732+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "Inside a Conservative Operation to Hijack Your Social-Media Feed - The Atlantic", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788357615.680925", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:20.265432+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [ { "cmd": [ "wget", "--no-verbose", "--adjust-extension", "--convert-links", "--force-directories", "--backup-converted", "--span-hosts", "--no-parent", "-e", "robots=off", "--timeout=120", "--restrict-file-names=windows", "--warc-file=/data/archive/1788357615.680925/warc/1788365886", "--page-requisites", "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/GNU Wget 1.21.3", "--compression=auto", "https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447/" ], "cmd_version": "GNU Wget 1.21.3", "end_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:20.247513+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447/index.html", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788357615.680925", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-02T16:18:06.751672+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": null, "dom": null, "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": null, "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "Inside a Conservative Operation to Hijack Your Social-Media Feed - The Atlantic", "warc": null, "wget": "www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447/index.html" }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1788357615.680925", "newest_archive_date": "2026-09-02T16:18:21.991515+00:00", "num_failures": 0, "num_outputs": 6, "oldest_archive_date": "2026-09-02T16:18:06.112155+00:00", "path": "/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447/", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_id": "79fac6ef-1960-4f1e-b5a8-87223fd9d3c9", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1788357615-import.txt" ], "tags": ",pool,war-wiki,drudge", "tags_str": "pool,war-wiki,drudge", "timestamp": "1788357615.680925", "title": "Inside a Conservative Operation to Hijack Your Social-Media Feed - The Atlantic", "updated": "2026-09-02T16:18:06.111925+00:00", "updated_date": "2026-09-02 16:18", "url": "https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/conservative-hijack-social-media/688447/" }